Small pleasures in big things

Rating: 6/10 (13 July 2013)

Pacific Rim is an extremely small movie about extremely big things hitting each other extremely loudly.
Yes, small.
Small in terms of scope, ideas, characterization, script rewrites, concise editing, cliché- avoidance you name it. Those moved to tears by maverick director Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth – the polar opposite on all aforementioned fronts – may find this perplexing at best, and infuriating at worst. How could a writer-director capable of such depth make a film so (contrary to its title, to use up the supply of droll turns-of-phrase) shallow?
The trick is to treat Pacific Rim as the world's most expensive B-movie, and all its shortcomings as intentional camp. This almost works. Indeed, there comes a gleeful sense of triumph at one of the most acclaimed working directors finally gifted with the kind of budget that has always eluded him and using it to expensively homage the tacky, under-budgeted monster movies that wowed him as a youth. However, as is common with big-budget pastiche, the tension between low-budget sensibility and big-budget expectations is never fully resolved, and the film losing its nerve in owning up to and overplaying its purposeful stupidity makes for an often-unsettling watch. Sequences of lengthy, drawn-out, predictable clichés treated as gasp-worthy plot twists occupy the dreaded purgatory between "good" and "so-bad-its-good", satisfying neither.
The film opens with a smirking, concise and electric guitar-fuelled montage, which establishes not only the mythology and cursory science behind 'alien attackers vs. giant robot suit defenders', but the consequences behind it – the sociocultural ramifications behind Earth being invaded, logistics of humans relocating, jaeger pilots becoming "rock stars", even toys and other merchandise created in tandem with the conflict. Here, with a World War Z (the book, not the film) approach to the monster genre, spectacle and smarts are effortlessly blended – Godzilla circa Jurassic Park – and hopes are immediately set high, with no reason to expect the film to falter from this point on. But, inevitably, it does, and such momentary intelligence is quickly jettisoned for a succession of Hollywood clichés hammered loudly by stale acting. Again, it is hard not to see this approach as intentional, and the film is loud and often unexpectedly funny enough to make the ride worthwhile. It is simply no longer as fun.
But, as with many del Toro projects, the beauty lies in the images. Or, in this case, the violence. On these fronts, Pacific Rim does not disappoint. The special effects, wedding del Toro's rubbery, stone-hewn aesthetics with CGI, are flawless. The alien kaiju are the most visually innovative monstrosities to rampage across screens in years – staggeringly large, covered in sharp edges, and throbbing with an intriguing blue light. The defenders – giant robotic exoskeleton jaegers (though subtext of German "attackers" versus Japanese "monsters" is best avoided), are equally fun, equally winking at clunky, diving-bell robots of vintage Japanese science-fiction. The film's best (and, effectively, only) plot twists lie in finding steadily more imaginative ways for the two titanic combatants to fight.
The destruction is appealingly vast (it is no coincidence that I heard no fewer than three separate audience members leaving the theatre griping "But where were the Avengers already?!"). However, unlike many of the plethora of other apocalyptic releases this year, del Toro keeps the focus immediately on the seismic fisticuffs of the monster fights, rather than extending his focus out to fetishize the wanton destruction. This lends Pacific Rim a curious intimacy, and one which, in a strange way, is far more effective than any of the script's fumbling attempts at humanizing its carbon-copy humans.
Indeed, it is no surprise that, in the fiendish mind of del Toro, the most imaginative aspect of any character is their names. It isn't every movie in which characters named Stacker Pentecost, Hercules Hansen, Hannibal Chau, Newton Geizler, and Raleigh Becket exchange dialogue, and this in itself almost excuses the largely flat (but not flat enough) or cartoonish (but not uniformly cartoonish enough) performances. In many cases, del Toro simply supplants eccentric costuming as a shorthand to interesting character development (poor Clifton Collins Jr., being out-acted by an unfortunate bow-tie/suspenders/sideburns ensemble). And, inevitably, critiquing acting here is almost as redundant as stopping to reflect on the script's scientific liberties and purposeful misdirections (dinosaurs have how many brains?).
Nonetheless, Charlie Hunnam is earnest, but snooze-worthy and instantly forgettable as the latest entry in "generic white American male sci-fi leads 101". Idris Elba stealing the show as Marshall Stacker Pentecost (a name worth repeating twice) is a given, as Elba mines unexpected reserves of gravitas, pathos, heart, and often humour out of his steely military stereotype. His "Do not mistake my calm exterior!" reprimand is just as likely to be belted out triumphantly in quoting wars as his already clumsily iconic "Tonight we are CANCELING THE APOCALYPSE!" pump-up speech. Rinko Kikuchi, while a pleasantly unexpected piece of casting, is still too underwritten to have much to do, and the script's frequent infantilization of her reads as too tiredly patriarchal to even be played for laughs or genre convention. On the cartoonish side, Charlie Day and Ron Pearlman have oodles of fun, though Burn Gorman, who sounds like a del Toro name himself, as the requisite twitchy German(?) scientist is less welcomely so.
A curiosity in its ambiguous simplicity, del Toro's Pacific Rim, while always trashily fun, could easily have been 40 minutes shorter (and at least 40% better), had it bothered less with plot and characterization, which it only does begrudgingly anyway. A true triumph would be to see an alternate cut which wilfully embraces its campy stupidity and cheerful pastiche, milking the true enjoyment of its sublime creature effects. Still, for all your "monsters vs. robots" needs (and, let's face it, who doesn't have them?), del Toro proves a cheerfully triumphant dealer. And this is enough.
-6/10